The Blue Waters project at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will offer a graduate course on High Performance Visualization for Large-Scale Scientific Data Analytics in Spring 2015. This semester-long online course will provide students with free access to Blue Waters, one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. Blue Waters performs quadrillions of calculations every second (at a peak of 13.35 petaflops) and can work with quadrillions of bytes of data.

The course is intended for graduate students in computer science or areas related to computational sciences who are interested in learning how to use visualization to analyze large-scale scientific data sets and also will be of interest to students who are considering scientific visualization as a research topic for their advanced studies.

The instructor is Dr. Han-Wei Shen, professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the Ohio State University.  Participating institutions will need to provide a local instructor who will be responsible for advising the local students and officially assigning grades.  Students will complete the online course exams and exercises as part of their grade.

Prerequisites for the graduate students include:

  • Experience working in a Unix environment
  • Experience developing and running codes written in C or C++
  • Knowledge in 3D computer graphics and OpenGL/GPU programming is recommended
  • Knowledge in parallel programming tools such as MPI is recommended

University partners who are interested in offering the course for credit to their students should contact Steve Gordon at [email protected] or 614-292-4132.

[This notification was posted in the International Science Grid This Week]